Vertical Videos: The Future of Social Media Marketing

You may not like it, but vertical videos outperform their horizontal counterparts across the board. It’s time to get on board with vertical videos in your marketing.

Vertical Videos: The Future of Social Media Marketing

With the existence of smartphones, our daily online activities have shifted from the desktop to our palm-sized gadgets.

Cisco predicted that the global mobile data traffic will increase seven fold between 2016 and 2021.

 

The increasing amount of mobile traffic, one way or another, can affect your marketing methods to suit the more current mobile-oriented audience.

 

One way you could approach a mobile-oriented audience is adjusting your marketing strategy to be more mobile-friendly. One of the best ways to do it is by creating vertical videos.

 

Ever since IGTV made its debut, it seems that everyone has caught the vertical video bug. Instagram isn’t the first to use this format. There have been various sightings of vertical videos on platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, and Snapchat which shows that they’re here to stay.

 

The Vertical Future

 

If you’ve scrolled through Youtube, you might have seen comments or videos shunning the vertical trend. However, it’s not going to hide the fact that sometimes going vertical can be a good thing.

 

The truth is, your audience is lazy.

Smartphone users hold their phones vertically about 94% of the time because they don’t like having to repeatedly turn their phone sideways. This doesn’t mean you should go vertical for everything. Some things should stay horizontal such as movies and TV shows.

 

Vertical videos have a higher completion rate.

According to mobile advertising platform, MediaBrix, vertical videos see a 90% higher completion rate compared to horizontal videos.

Their data also states that less than 30% of users turn their phones sideways to watch an ad and those who actually do only watch 14% of the video ad.

 

About 52% of global internet traffic in the 2nd quarter of 2018 came from mobile traffic alone which shows that the way we access content is changing.

 

That explains why the biggest social media platforms are adapting to the vertical format rather quickly.

 

Knowing that this trend is almost certain to persist, social media have embraced the format as opposed to challenging it. A couple of examples are Youtube and Snapchat.

 

Youtube enabled full-screen video playback for vertical videos which adjusts its size based on the video’s aspect ratio. Snapchat, the pioneer of ephemeral content encourages vertical videos for users and advertisers alike by adding new filters and features.

 

If you want to find out more about vertical videos as marketing tools, the folks at Breadnbeyond created this comprehensive infographic below!

 

[Infographic]

 

vertical videos